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Thursday, March 14, 2013

A Serious WWE Blunder

The opinions expressed in this blog post are not
necessarily shared by the staff of Pro Wrestling Illustrated. Not by a long
shot.

In fact, I’ve been hard pressed to find many wrestling fans
who believe, as I do, that this
Youtube video posted by WWE a couple of weeks ago was downright
disgraceful.

In case you haven’t seen the video, which was the talk of
the Internet wrestling community for a few days, it begins with Jack Swagger
and Zeb Colter spewing the same anti-immigrant rhetoric as they have on
television for weeks. That’s not the problem.

My beef comes with the drastic turn the promo takes around
the 1:40 mark. The cameras pull back to reveal a production set and a green
screen background. Colter and Swagger come out of character, even introducing
themselves by their real names. They explain how wrestling promos work, and
that they are simply entertainers playing roles. Colter goes as far as to say
that in real-life he is friends with Jose Rodriguez, the performer portraying
his mortal enemy, Alberto Del Rio. Way to sell a WrestleMania World title
match.

This was all done as a retort to criticisms made by conservative
political commentator Glenn Beck, who had dismissed the Swagger/Colter
storyline as having been devised by “stupid wrestling people.”

The video mobilized fans to the defense of WWE. Throughout
social media, even the most jaded of fans proclaimed that they were never
prouder to be part of the WWE Universe and praised Swagger, Colter, and the
entire promotion for “telling it like it is.”

But amid all their appreciation for the message behind the
groundbreaking video, fans failed to see the considerable damage it did to the
entire pro wrestling industry.

Like few other things in the sport’s history, the
Swagger/Colter video shattered the illusion necessary for fans to fully enjoy
pro wrestling, and it did so in a particularly flippant and reckless manner.

To a lot of wrestling fans, mine may come off like an
outdated philosophy, especially in an era when just about every fan older than
four (and even many younger) can separate reality from sports entertainment.
But my gripe isn’t with the fact that WWE came out and said it’s all a show.
It’s how they said it.

Imagine that you’re engrossed in a particularly suspenseful
episode of Law & Order SVU.
Detective Benson kicks down a door, opens fire, and shoots a perp to death.

Then you hear, “Cut!”

Benson looks at the camera, introduces herself as actress
Mariska Hargitay, and goes on to lash out at a particular television critic who
panned her show. When she’s done, the director audibly calls out, “Action!” and
the scene continues.

That would be pretty absurd, wouldn’t it? Well, it’s no
different than what WWE pulled with its video, complete with Colter and Swagger
resuming their wrestling promo after they finished delivering their message to
Beck.

To be sure, a lot has changed since the days when “Dr. D”
David Shultz was ordered to assault 20/20
reporter John Stossel for even suggesting that wrestling was fake. But if the
Colter/Swagger Youtube video showed anything, it’s that the collective
wrestling universe has moved too far in the other direction.

Back then, protecting “kayfabe” was about pulling the wool
over the fans eyes. But over the years, wrestling has evolved to the point that
the wrestlers, promoters, and fans are all in on it together. To some extent,
giving fans a peak behind the curtain is a good thing, as it shows that
promoters and wrestlers respect fans enough to know that they don’t need to
believe what they’re watching is “real” in order to enjoy it. The open nature
of modern pro wrestling has also allowed wrestlers, promoters, and journalists
to share—in the right context—compelling stories about what happens away from
the ring without fear of reprisal.

But none of that is to say that wrestlers or
promoters—especially WWE—should so flippantly tear down the fourth fall that’s
necessary for pro wrestling to be successful. If you’ve followed this business
for any length of time, you’ve heard about the importance of “suspending
disbelief” in enjoying wrestling. Sadly, I think too many fans, wrestlers, and
promoters don’t understand what that actually means.

Perhaps no institution values the importance of kayfabe more
than Pro Wrestling Illustrated. We
realize that for fans to fully enjoying the escapist entertainment that is pro
wrestling, they need to lose themselves in its characters and storylines. That
might seem obvious to some, but promoters have chipped away so much at that principle
over the years that they don’t even realize when they’re breaking that rule.
Ironically, much of the damage has been done by promoters intent on presenting
wrestling as more “real” and “not insulting the intelligence” of fans. That
kind of thing often leads to the bane of my existence as a wrestling fan: the
“worked shoot.”

And really, at its core, that’s what the Colter/Swagger
video was—a manufactured promotional tactic aimed at inciting emotion in fans
by making them think they were watching something that wasn’t part of the show.
The true nature of the video as nothing more than a publicity stunt was exposed
when WWE sent TV cameras to Beck’s studio to confront him, and then put out a
press release accusing him of “hiding” from WWE.

I’m all for WWE defending its fans, of which I count myself
as one, from the ignorant remarks of critics who don’t understand the appeal of
pro wrestling. There were several different ways for WWE to make the same
point. Vince McMahon or some other WWE executive could have recorded a video
message responding to Beck. I would have even accepted, somewhat begrudgingly,
if the video began with Colter and Swagger out of character delivering the
message to Beck.

But there’s an obvious, better option: Having Colter and Swagger
respond to Beck in character. Alas, WWE apparently realized that, pulled down
the original video, and replaced it with this one.

And then there’s what I’d say is the best option of all:
Ignoring Beck all together. Another often-misused wrestling term is “mark.” WWE
tried to prove to us that Beck was a mark for thinking WWE and its fans were
comprised of “stupid wrestling people,” but ended up going out of their way to
respond to a throw-away remark, and in doing so just left Beck with a worse
impression of the wrestling business than he already had.

Fans who enjoyed the “shoot” promo by Colter and Swagger may
have seen it as a proclamation of the fact that they’re not marks. But, along
the way, they were roped into the most transparent attempt to exploit fans’
loyalty this side of the “Stand Up For WWE” political campaign.

In its truest sense, a mark is a sucker; one too gullible to
realize he’s been had.